


Gift

by Shoi



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoi/pseuds/Shoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once given, it cannot be taken back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gift

**Author's Note:**

> brief apologies for disjointedness, for blatant o. henry references, and for the fact that i do not actually know any old persian, despite usage here. also, i'm not fully familiar with the ao3 system, here, so i'd like to add additional warnings of my own as all of these things are things i know can be particularly upsetting for some even in the smallest amounts: teenage boys having sex, implied past rape and child abuse, and some relatively minor violence. 
> 
> thanks for reading!

_"But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest."_

-O. Henry

***

Judal is dying under his hands at last, and he can feel nothing but relief.

***

By the third day, not even Sinbad can wake him, and Ja'far finds him seated on the dais steps in the empty throne room with his precious burden cradled across his knees. The child's suffering is visible. He is limp and unresponsive in Sinbad's arms, his face burning beneath both of their hands, his mouth open as he gasps weakly for air. There is a terrible whistling in the back of his throat.

"He won't even take water anymore," Sinbad whispers, voice hoarse. Ja'far takes the filled bowl from his side without a word and dips his hand in as a cup, and Sinbad lifts the boy's head up as Ja'far raises the water to his lips. Some of it goes in, but he won't swallow, and Sinbad curses softly as the water stains his sleeping robe instead.

"We'll find a way," Ja'far says, without looking at him. He turns and in one swift motion tears a strip away from his own clean robe, twisting it tightly, then dips it into the water again. After it's absorbed enough he lifts it, dripping, over the boy's head, and guides the end into his mouth. A moment, or two, and then the child whimpers softly, but turns his head towards the water and swallows greedily. Ja'far's smile is proud and relieved at once.

"There," he says, but Sinbad can't even feel a momentary relief.

"He's dying," he says, the words hurting worse than any wound or curse.

"He's not," Ja'far says sharply. Ja'far isn't so very much older than the boy is, Sinbad thinks. Seventeen is much closer to ten than twenty one is. They are both children to him.

"Judal," he says softly instead, touching the sweat-matted black hair, knowing that not even the sound of his voice will reach his magi now. "Judal, please."

***

He had been seventeen, and a little drunk in a warm dim drinking hall whose main chambers had been carved directly out of the magnificent face of a red mountain, its entryway flanked by _shedu_ , winged lions with the heads of men, the symbols of their goddess etched into their foreheads. The wine was enough to turn the din of dozens of voices into a pleasant murmur, the mountain's cold red walls maintaining a perfect temperature balance against the blazing torches hung from the ceiling. Ja'far had been small then, still -- he supposed that he, too, was still small then -- and his pale eyes reflected the fire eerily when he looked at Sinbad, his customary expression of consternation softened into an appealing young confusion. Sinbad remembered thinking that he was beautiful then, more interesting than the young women who had crowded onto their blanket to hear him finish his most recent tale of adventure. He remembered enjoying Ja'far's beauty without condition. It would be the last time anything beautiful would ever be simple, to him.

The man in the veil had come to him when he'd finished his story, as the women who had noticed the direction of Sinbad's attention were getting up to leave.

"You are Sinbad," he said.

Ja'far had risen from his side immediately without a word. Sinbad had experienced a sharp pang of irritation.

"I am," he had said, and he had smiled, as was his custom when he was unbalanced.

"We would like," the man said, in a voice as smooth as Goguryeo silk, "To offer you something, as befits your status of king. A gift."

"Surely," Sinbad had said, "I would be most grateful to accept a gift, but would it not be more convenient for all of us to exchange pleasantries in the morning, and somewhere other than a public drinking hall?" Ja'far's eyes were on him again, a little heated in more ways than one, and Sinbad strained to keep smiling.

"Indeed," the veiled man said. He sounded like he was smiling. "But these circumstances are not ordinary, and we are not prepared to surrender this gift entirely to you, not just yet."

"A strange gift," he said, and he remembered ever after how alarmed he'd been, how closely he should have attended his instincts to refuse. "Well, then, what would you have me do?"

The veiled man had beckoned him then, and turned away without another word.

In the back of the hall, where rooms for weary travelers were available, they had stopped, and the man gestured silently for Sinbad to enter past the curtains and into the small chamber beyond. With Ja'far's impatient expression etched firmly in his mind, and the weight of wine making him perhaps more careless than he should have been, Sinbad had done as he was bidden.

At first, he had not understood.

In the middle of the bedding there, atop a soft pile of goose-down and sheep's wool blankets, of pillows embroidered in scenes of desert travel and oasis landscapes, there had been a most exquisite child, sleeping. He was not more than five or six. His skin was the lovely warm color of the peoples of the west and south, hair long and glossy, scattered in black waves around his body. He was dressed richly in clothing of some origin unknown to Sinbad, and Sinbad had been acutely away of the veiled man watching him, seeking some reaction.

"Judal is weary from our journey," the man had said, his hand still holding the curtain aside, "or I would have him introduce himself."

"That is," Sinbad began, and had to stop again, at a loss. Intrigue and revulsion warred within him. "It is a generous thing, but I do not deal in slaves."

The veiled man's laugh had not been kind, though it had been knowing.

"If you are lucky," he had said, "Judal will make you his."

 

***

The year of Judal's fourteenth birthday, Sinbad finishes a single strand of salt-water pearls. Their colors range from the clearest moon to the deepest earthen black, and some are even red, seeming to boil from within like captured lava. He travels for a week, alone, following the procession of celebration and pilgrims to Judal's most recent temple, and in the dead of night he steals inside, through the perfumed curtains and tinkling beads. Judal is awake within, and he regards Sinbad with that cool and predatory look Sinbad has come to accept is a part of him now. He has grown even more in the few months since Sinbad has last seen him.

"Really?" is all Judal says. His hair is unbound and his eyes look almost naturally colored in the lantern’s light. His legs are crossed neatly beneath him and that jeweled collar is still around his throat.

"Always," Sinbad replies firmly. He kneels on the endless mound of soft bedding and fine pillows, and holds the string out before him with both hands, his head bowed low. A noise of delight escapes Judal at such a display of humility, and some of the haughty decorum seems to leave him; he scrambles forward and into Sinbad, snatching his gift from his hands with nimble fingers. As his arms descend around Sinbad's neck and his lips find Sinbad's ear, Sinbad exhales. He feels as though he's been holding his breath for years. Maybe he has.

***

Judal struggles furiously, hissing, almost roaring like the tiger Sinbad knows him to be -- never tamed, always dangerous, maneating -- but Sinbad no long has the space for mercy, not in head nor in heart.

He kneels hard on Judal's wrists and takes the boy's face between his hands. He reaches deeply into the wild white tangle of power, gripping it in great ephemeral handfuls, and he pulls upwards and out.

Judal shrieks with real agony this time, and Sinbad thinks that there was probably a time such a sound might have moved him. But the hands clenching at his legs have Ja'far's blood on them, as does the packed earth behind him, as does Ja'far, motionless and pale beneath Masrur's panicked hands, and all other things have faded into the background. He can feel the wild hammering of Judal's animal heart, panicked, clawing to save itself from death.

He is relieved. He should have done this long ago. For both their sakes.

***

The little magi is bright and curious, and holds Sinbad's hand in both of his as Sinbad shows him around the half-built palace.

"It'll be grander, one day," Sinbad says, feeling the lack of grandness in the presence of a sacred creature, a thing nearly god and nearly immortal. But Judal only smiles, his strange red eyes big and the lift of his brows genuine.

"I don't care," he says. "It's just a building."

Judal climbs the fruit trees in the little courtyard outside his room, and finds a cobra nesting under the stones, which Sinbad only hears about later from a far too calm Ja'far, who assures him that "she was friendly, and only curious anyway." Judal likes to sit beneath his desk while he works, stealing scrolls and items from the surface to inquire with tactile curiosity about their usage. Judal shares Sinbad's distaste for cow meat, he says, because once a beautiful man had come from the south with a fine and plump young calf on a golden lead, and had presented it to him as "a new brother," and indeed the creature had seemed so human when it gazed into his eyes with bovine serenity that Judal had been moved to tears. Judal sits in his lap when he addresses subjects and official business, and braids his hair with deep sincerity as he listens to diplomacy at work. Sometimes Judal escapes them both for several panicked hours, and Drakan or someone finds him down in the city temples, peering fearlessly at the pilgrims and the sick who have crowded around to see the king's magi, to extract miracles from the child's small hands.

"It's my job," Judal always protests, when Sinbad comes to gather him and take him home with stern warnings about safety and going places without supervision. "I'm a priest. People need to see me. Anyway, what are they going to do? Nothing can hurt me." He smiles, and his red eyes seem unnaturally bright when he does. "I'm immortal."

"He listens so closely," Ja'far says to him in the night, his pale hand warm across Sinbad's bare belly, fingers brushing idle at the dark curling hair forming there. "I'm not sure I'm qualified to be this kind of a teacher."

"You're qualified for anything you'd like to be qualified for," Sinbad says, a little giddy with afterglow and the success of this strange and unexpected gift. "It's my kingdom." He tangles his fingers in Ja'far's soft hair, filled with warmth and love for him -- not in love, no, they both know better than that, but instead a deep and sweet adoration he's not sure anything else will ever touch. Serious, fearsome Ja'far, whom he knows would give every inch of himself, soul and body alike, at Sinbad's word.

Ja'far snorts at him. "I mean," he says, as always unimpressed by Sinbad's bravado, "That I feel he listens so closely to everything I say or explain, as though he's -- like he's trying to determine the moral balance of it all."

"He's eight," Sinbad says, though he's felt the same before. "He's a child."

"He's a magi," Ja'far says, and he looks at Sinbad with his own strange eyes, reflecting unnaturally in the dark. "And wasn't I a child, too?"

***

"In the old days," Judal says, "It wasn't so easy." He's sitting on the edge of Sinbad's bed, combing out his hair again. The ornate jar of hair oil sits next to his bare knee. The lantern’s fire evokes the deep bronze from his skin, like embers."You know that, right?" He looks up at Sinbad and smiles, mocking. " _Shahanshah-biorze._ " His Partavian is fluid and nearly native, save for the odd accentuation he places on harder sounds. " _Shahanshah-biorze_ , who knows everything."

"Yes," Sinbad says calmly, though he doesn't fully know, not really, and Judal's expression doesn't change at all.

"Before the priests made us sacred," Judal says, leaning back onto his hands for a moment, "Before it was understood that we are vast. Then, we were the same, but humans weren't. Magi have always needed kings, and queens. Desperately. Like children. Like slaves, a little. Now, of course, it's honorable to be the object of our want." He smiles again. "They come to me, begging, all the time. They don't care what I'll do with them. They only want power."

Sinbad is silent.

"Before, they were afraid of us in a different way. Afraid we would leave them. They didn't understand what it means -- what it feels like." He presses a hand against his chest, the fingers clenching suddenly. "You know all your life that a day will come when you give yourself, your entire self, to one person. When it's given, it can't be taken back."

Judal laughs quietly, as though Sinbad isn't even there.

"It's like dying inside, forever. How is a mortal meant to understand that?" he says.

***

Ja'far is well versed in poisons, which means also that he is well versed in medicines, and it is he who manages finally to concoct something that eases Judal's feverish pain.

"Children get sick," he says, voice tense as Sinbad hovers behind him, twisting his hands together. Ja'far does not like to be interrupted at work, even if his work is no longer dealing in death. "It's normal." Judal is sitting out of earshot on the straw blanketing in the herbal room, head hanging tiredly, clutching the ornate carnelian focus wand that Sinbad had gifted him for his tenth birthday.

"Not like this," Sinbad says. His throat is tight. "What if he gets worse? You were never this bad--"

Ja'far looks up at him finally, with that unique expression of patient exasperation that is so singly his. "I spent my childhood sleeping in rain and snow," he says, "fighting Dungeon demons with my bare hands. Drinking snake venom." He extends his left arm, where beneath the red wrappings of his flying daggers' tether there is one long scar, deeper than the others, down the delicate pale underside all the way to the elbow. "Master cut me open and threw me into the forest this day," he says, as calm as always, as though he is not discussing the hideous abuse that made him a merciless killer by ten years old. "I packed it with mud so I wouldn't bleed to death."

Sinbad cannot find the words for this; he never can. He remembers that ten year old, dull-eyed and animal-tense, saying softly that he was called " _Tselka,_ " the word for "virgin" in his tongue, as Sinbad examined the hideous scarring up and down the insides of his thighs with nauseated horror. Tselka, because it was ironic, and cruel.

"Yes," he says at last, swallowing.

Ja'far lowers his arm and turns back to his work. "I was rarely ill because I was exposed to illness," he explains, the sound of his pestle a regular muffled crunch. "How often do you think Judal's even been dirty?"

Sinbad looks over his shoulder at the boy, who lifts his head immediately to meet his gaze. Judal smiles at him, weak but reassuring, and Sinbad turns to him without thinking, crossing the dim little room to lift him off the straw and settle him against his chest instead. Judal puts his head on Sinbad's shoulder.

"I'll be ok," he says, very certain of his safety as he always is. "I'm immortal, remember?"

"Of course you are," Sinbad says. He smiles, despite himself.

***

It is Masrur, of all ironies, who saves him, his low voice trembling faintly as he calls, "Sire?"

Sinbad blinks slowly, though his stranglehold on Judal doesn't loosen. Judal has stopped struggling by now, but Sinbad can feel him breathing, feel the raw fury and hatred radiating off of him and thrumming through the very center of Sinbad's being. Even now there can be no distance between his soul and Judal's wants, Judal's emotions.

"Sire, I need -- he's alive, but he's -- I need your help."

Sinbad lifts his head. Masrur's usually serene expression is twisted with naked hurt. One large hand rests on Ja'far's head, the other hovering over the wound's vicinity, terrified to move him, terrified to leave him. There's bright blood on Ja'far's lips, his blade tethers coiled in tangled limp strings across his chest.

"Why not?" Judal mumbles. His voice is muffled under Sinbad's heavy hand. "Why not?" Laughter bubbles up out of him, strangled, like it hurts on levels more than physical. His eyes flutter open again, unfocused towards the sky. " _Shahanshah._ Kill me."

"He never did you harm," Sinbad whispers back, still aching for some retribution. "He loved you."

"For a time," Judal says. "Like you did."

"Any loss of love," Sinbad says, fist clenching over Judal's heart, "Was not by my action, Judal."

"Nor mine," Judal says, and laughs again, twisting suddenly under Sinbad like a head-captured snake. His hands move with unexpected speed and Sinbad hears the clatter of ice spears before he even sees them plunging. He snatches at Judal's wrist and yanks the power right out of him, and this time Judal doesn't cry out, only shudders and falls limp, eyes rolled back in his head senselessly.

When he turns back he sees Masrur in a helpless half crouch, half risen to protect his king, but wavering. Sinbad smiles at him without feeling, without anything at all.

"What should we do with him?" Masrur says, calm again now that Ja'far is safely in Sinbad's arms, the wound wrapped and the blood wiped from his face. He looks at Judal.

Sinbad looks, too, aware that Judal is vulnerable like this, that he'll sleep for days until he's recovered from the loss of all that he is.

"Leave him," he says, shortly, and they do.

***

"You shouldn't come here anymore," Judal says, once his hair's been rebraided and he's settled down again under Sinbad's arm. The night's chill clings to his skin and Sinbad rubs his shoulder and upper arm slowly, knowing how he hates to be cold. Judal nearly purrs, pressing his nose into Sinbad's collarbone.

"Why not?" Sinbad says. They have this exchange often, and it never holds. "Temples are for all people to visit. A magi's blessing is for all. Do you think I'm afraid of your keepers?"

"The only thing you're afraid of is yourself." Judal untucks a thick lock of Sinbad's hair and fingers it, then begins to braid it. In Old Partevia, braiding another's hair had been an intimate lover's act, and it feels no different with Judal's sure fingers going through the automatic motions. "So, no. That's why you're _biorze._ " He grins, boyish. "Shall I teach you the word in Kougo, too?"

"No." Sinbad rolls over and fits his hands against Judal's slim hips, kisses him just above the breastbone, then below, down to his belly, where Judal has laced a tiny golden bell through his customary navel piercing. Judal squirms, laughing, and nips at his shoulder, digging his teeth in a little too deeply for it to be entirely nice.

"You should know it!" he cries. "You should, one of their words for a fool is-"

"I don't care-"

"It's _shah,_ like _shah!_ " Judal laughs wildly, slinging his arm around Sinbad's neck as Sinbad's wayfaring mouth returns to his face. "Foolish king, in every language I know! _Shah Shahanshan biorze,_ foolish King-of-Kings, the fool!"

" _Bebrcheh,_ " Sinbad growls, and Judal shudders under the weight of the old nickname, stilling to smile up at him with eyes full of promise and interest. " _Bebrcheh,_ little tiger, you should learn to respect your king."

"How can I respect my king, when he refuses to even be mine?" Judal murmurs, but for once there is no barb in the words, no hidden poison.

"I will give you every reason I have," Sinbad says, and it is soon enough that he is drawing a litany of agreements from Judal's lips.

***

Judal has barely slept in his own room since he arrived, choosing instead to curl on one of Sinbad's low couches or even in Sinbad's bed. It is nothing untoward -- he's only a child -- and Judal scoffs at him when Sinbad asks him gently if he feels uncomfortable with such things.

"You," he says, holding Sinbad's hands in both of his as he always does, "Would never hurt me."

"Certainly not," Sinbad says, smiling.

"I was scared, before I met you," Judal says, the smile fading from his face. He clutches Sinbad's hand a little more tightly. "I didn't know what it would be like."

"What, this? The--" Sinbad gestures a little with his free hand. "The whole king business?"

Judal nods, very solemn now. "They told me one day I'd meet someone," he says. "A woman, or a man, or maybe someone in between -- I've met some like that. And that when I met them, I'd know who it was... like recognizing a forgotten friend." He bites his lip and looks away, visibly recalling his anxiety. "Once I recognized them, I'd make them great. They'd be lucky to have me."

"They would be lucky," Sinbad says.

Judal smiles, but it's brief. "But," he says, "They would have me, truly. Because we're powerful, they told me, we need a human to hold onto us. To temper us. A human who has all power over us. Who we can't help but adore." He looks up into Sinbad's eyes, and Sinbad sees that young fear there, the fear of control, of losing autonomy to some mysterious stranger. "Once I knew them as my King, I could never be apart from them again."

Sinbad is quiet for a moment, but he runs his hand through Judal's hair. The boy's grip on his hand is vice-tight now.

"It's unfair," he says at last, and Judal nods once. "It's unfair to you, isn't it?"

"I think so," Judal says. His voice is very small. "But it is the way of things."

Sinbad strokes his hair again, and draws breath to speak, but Judal interrupts him suddenly.

"So when I met you," he says, "I was relieved." His smile returns, bright and sweet, and not a little worshipful. "I was relieved that it was you. Because you -- I can be yours. I want to be yours. I want to protect you. I want to fight for Sindria. It's good here. You're good." He releases Sinbad's hand and touches the hollow of his throat with gentle fingers.

"I would like you to be my king," he whispers.

Sinbad swallows, feeling the preternatural warm of the boy's touch, reaching for him, the safety of him, for the certainty that Sinbad is all of those things that people say about him but which he never believes himself: capable, wise, kind. Good.

"Judal," he murmurs. "It is my greatest honor."

***

It is that third night upon which the veiled man returns for the first time since delivering Judal into Sindria's care. Sinbad leaves Ja'far drowsing on Sinbad's bed with Judal bundled close to him in blankets, the heavy sweet smells of yarrow and _kunnab_ smoke hanging around them both, and meets him alone in the throne room.

The man has brought two fellows with him, both as veiled as he, and strangely interchangeable.

"We have come to see how things progress," says the man, without preamble, and Sinbad feels his first pangs of anger.

"Certainly," he says, reaching as always for grace. "Sirs, I'd be happy to put you all up for the night, and we can discuss matters in the morning. I'm afraid we're all a little tired and pre-occupied at the moment." He smiles, spreading his hands in a universal gesture of helplessness.

"I see," says the man, and Sinbad hates that he cannot see the man's face to judge him. "We would prefer to talk now, Your Highness, if you will excuse us."

"Judal is ill," Sinbad says, unable to quite keep the edge of impatience out of his voice. "And as I am his king, he needs me--"

"Ill?" the man sounds surprised. He turns to his fellows, and the three of them confer in a language Sinbad is certain he's never heard before. Their conversation goes on for more than a minute, and Sinbad tries to ignore the ache in his feet and his back, the worry gnawing at his gut. His patience does not last.

"Sirs," he says, "Please, I would greatly love to discuss things with you, but I feel I have a responsibility."

"You do, yes," says one of the other veiled men. "That you do."

"Yes," says the first, "You do indeed. We have come to discuss Judal's purpose with you. I'm pleased to hear that he has decided to select you. That makes things very easy."

Now the unease is for a new reason. "What things?" Sinbad says, dispensing with politeness.

"These are things he is yet too young to grasp," says the first man. "King Sinbad of Sindria, the price for our magi has come due."

"Price," Sinbad repeats, nearly in a whisper.

The man nods. "We require you to form your armies together immediately," he begins, "To grow your navy, and to consider beginning your acquisition of new djinn right away. There are empires not terribly far from yours with their own ideas of domination, and we would prefer not to be caught off guard."

"Domination," Sinbad says, "Of what, exactly?"

The third man makes an impatient noise, and the second's veiled head turns towards him. Sinbad can feel the burning stare beneath cloth, and he knows in one sudden chill moment that these are not men at all, no, but something else entirely. Something wrong.

"The world," the first one says, calm. "All of this realm, and then, perhaps, the next."

"No," Sinbad says, his voice hoarse. "That isn't what I want."

They are silent in return, watching him, and he feels the uncontrollable need to explain himself further, though a part of him is shrieking danger in shrill and panicky tones. "I can't," he says, "I can't even -- not now, of course. Judal is -- he's very ill, as I said, and--"

"Bring him to us, then," says the first. "We will see to him."

"No," Sinbad says. He finds the steel here, at last, the place at which his concern for decorum falls away and the warrior emerges, prepared to stand off and fight. "No. He stays where he is." He lifts his head. "Leave, now. We will discuss things on my terms. I am king, here. I will look after my magi in the way I see fit. Now, see yourselves out, or I will summon my guard."

For a moment, the three don't move at all, but then they step back in unnatural unison, and bow to him, deeply, before departing in a swishing of robes without another word.

***

"They told me you grew tired of me," Judal says, the mad smile still on his lips. "Isn't that strange? I was convinced, for a while. I was just a child, after all."

At Sinbad's back, Ja'far hisses a soft breath, and Sinbad hears the brief /twang/ of him arming himself. Masrur hasn't moved, but this is his first encounter with Judal, and he doesn't know yet the danger they're in.

"Why would they lie about something like that?" Judal says, his arms crossed gracefully across his chest. He is balanced perfectly on one foot on the railing of the house overlooking the Koronay marketplace. Around them the city's people are murmuring, lowering their stall curtains, backing away in alarm at what is clearly about to be a fight. "I couldn't figure it out. Then--"

He lands in front of Sinbad in an effortless crouch. "I realized," he says, in a horribly conversational voice, "They were trying to help me. They knew you'd be like this, once you understood everything."

He's smiling again, and one hand reaches out for Sinbad's face. "They knew you'd refuse me in the end."

"I didn't," Sinbad says tightly, lifting his head up and out of Judal's range. Judal pauses, then lets his hand drop, and tosses his head instead with a chuckle.

"Does that matter?" he says. "You have since."

And it is only Ja'far's speed and attention that saves him then from the sudden surging of magic, only Ja'far's lunge to meet Judal's power that does not see him dead here at Judal's feet. Judal goes sprawling into a display of woven baskets, drawing a frightened cry from the weaver, but Ja'far is on him immediately, blades flying. Sinbad feels the shout on his lips, the don't surging up in the back of his throat like bile. Don't, don't, don't hurt him, please. Mercy, he knows, is a hard learned lesson for Ja'far.

It is not a lesson, he knows, a moment later, as Judal's power tears a hole through Ja'far's clothes and his flesh, that Judal has ever properly learned.

And when Ja'far falls, leaving a terrible streak of his life's blood in the dust, Judal only looks up at Sinbad again, maddeningly unmoved, the rukh clustered to him like bees at a hive.

"And now," he says, lifting both his hands in a _mudra_ Sinbad has never seen before, "I will take you back myself."

He does not get the chance to finish his spell.

***

"I can't," Sinbad says, clutching him closer even as Judal tries to wiggle away. "Judal. You know I can't."

"Why not?" Judal demands, pulling at his robes, trying to free himself from Sinbad's hands. "Why do you always do this? What's more important to you? Don't tell me the answer, I know it already--" he wriggles free enough to look Sinbad in the eye, and the anger there is frightening, but so is the naked hurt.

"They're evil," Sinbad says, helpless, and Judal snarls at him, gripping his bicep and squeezing it so hard that it hurts.

"And so," he hisses, "You leave me to them to save yourself? Is that it?"

"It's not about me!" Sinbad exclaims, frustrated beyond measure, both with his heart and with this boy who possesses it so violently. "I cannot think of myself, I cannot be selfish."

"Is this not selfish?" Judal's teeth are bared, a deep flush in his cheeks. "Again and again you tell me no, but you come anyway -- you come for me, you come to absolve yourself with my body and you come to steal my Dungeons, you tell me I have no reason to be angry when you take everything from me, when I would have given it willingly?" He jerks his head up, and turns to spit on the finely polished sanctuary stones. "You want gifts, and so you steal them."

"It's not theft," Sinbad says, the edge of a growl in his own voice now. "It's necessity."

"When you throw something away _it is no longer yours!_ " Judal shrieks, and extracts himself from Sinbad's restraining grip with a sudden flare of power and a shove with both hands. "And when you take something that isn't yours, _it's theft!_ You do what you will, great king, but be honest about it at least!"

Sinbad staggers back, his hands dropping limply to his sides.

"They took you from me," he says, hating the heavy wetness burning his eyes now. "There was nothing I could do."

"And there have been ten thousand things since you could have done," Judal says. "But you can't. Always, you can't. I come to you like a child, I come begging, even, and you deny me." He lifts his head, gone suddenly haughty and cold, eyes narrowed.

"Save yourself," he intones. "Like you always do. Convince yourself that you're doing right by your kingdom and your people with this. And I promise you, _Shahanshah_ , so long as you do, I will never stop cutting down all those things that stand between us. Kingdoms are nothing to me. People are nothing to me." His lips are curling upwards as he speaks, the deadness creeping into his eyes. "I'll burn them all, Sin, until we're the only ones left. Consider your burdens now."

"Judal-"

But the boy is gone in a swirl of power and the jangle of metal, even as his voice still rings off the stones.

***

Sinbad rouses Ja'far and sends him, mumbling and bleary, to his own bed. He lies down beside Judal, who opens his eyes a little at the change in movement and smell, and smiles with recognition after a moment.

Sinbad takes the boy into his arms, touches the back of his neck reassuringly.

"Hi," Judal whispers. "Are you all right?"

"I'm just worried," Sinbad whispers back. "That's all right, isn't it?"

"No," Judal says, with a tiny, weary smile. "It's not a big deal."

"As you say," Sinbad says, smiling himself.

"I'm going to be fine," Judal says, but his voice lilts upwards on the last word to make it an uncertain question. Sinbad touches his hair.

"Yes," he says, with all the authority he has within him. "You're going to be fine. I'm here."

He sleeps not long after Judal sleeps, the boy tucked securely under his arm, and when he wakes again at dawn Judal is gone as though he'd never been there at all, save for his small robe, crumpled on the floor by the bed.

***

"No one asks me what I want," Judal says, his face buried in Sinbad's chest. There is no emotion in his voice. He has come unannounced and unbidden into the palace itself, weeks after their last encounter ended in screaming and near-bloodshed. These are the first words he's spoken since Sindbad rose to receive him. "They just assume. They move me around. Give me to people. To whole kingdoms. Something's going to happen soon. They're going to change me somehow, into something I can't undo again. I don't want that. I don't want it."

"What do you want?" Sinbad asks him. He thinks the question was obviously meant to be asked, but Judal looks up at him with such surprise and sudden vulnerability that he's taken momentarily aback. He grips Judal by the shoulders and meets his gaze.

"Judal," he says again. "What do _you_ want?"

Judal's mouth opens, his throat bobs. "I want," he begins, and has to stop, has to start over to keep his voice steady. "I want to come home."

***

Sinbad marks Judal's eighteenth birthday far away from where ever he is, alone on the road to Balbadd. By his small fire that night he dreams of a tiger cub caught in a snare, snarling and crying and twisting to free itself as it bleeds a terrible blackness into the jungle mud. It looks up at him with terrified red eyes and hisses a warning not to come too close.

"I don't want to hurt you," he says in the dream. "I just don't know how to help you. I don't know what to do."

_Don't leave me,_ the creature says to him, in that way of speaking in dreams that isn't language at all, but some hidden message written on the inside of the heart. _Please don't leave me._

In the dream Sinbad kneels in the mud, and the tiger cub lunges at him, clawing a deep furrow in his hand, but he reaches for it anyway, and gathers it close to him, marveling dumbly at the gloss of its golden coat, the softness of it. He imagines he can almost feel the creature breathing, and it's a familiar sensation, one whose origin he knows.

" _Bebrcheh,_ " he whispers, fitting one hand around the snare. "There must be something I can do." But the tiger has no more human wisdom left, it seems, and it only huddles, mewling, against his chest, and when he wakes again the weight of it still seems to be there, warm and living and helpless.

Sinbad wonders if it's true, that he's been selfish all along, using country and kingdom as a shield against a battle he knows he cannot win. He cannot face the Al Sarmen alone, and even with allies, it seems an impossible battle.

_There have been ten thousand things,_ says Judal's voice in his head, _you could have done._

_I want to come home._

They were giving him a gift, they'd said. A gift worthy of his greatness as hero. As a king. But the gift, he knew now, had not been theirs to give. In his memory, the child remains, the child who'd held his hand in both his own, had said with shy and uncertain trepidation that Sinbad was good, Sinbad was his.

"I did as I was meant to," Ja'far had said, when he'd woken at last from the coma induced by medicine and wound. "But, I think, so did he. He can't help what he is, Sin."

"What is he, then?" Sinbad had said, exhausted of it all, of worry and rage and fear. "What is he, Ja'far?"

"Yours," was all Ja'far had said.

There must be something.

He will try, he thinks suddenly, as he packs his things for the day's walk. He will try. No trap is unbreakable, no sea unsailable, no dungeon too lethal. There is no storm impossible to tame. Not for him. Not even a spell dark and deep enough to hold a magi in lifelong captivity can stand against him. Judal has given him the only thing of his own that he has to give, and Sinbad is not so far away from his sailing days that he has forgotten entirely how to be a hero.

"There is a way," he murmurs to himself, shrugging on his pack. "There is always a way."

After all, he thinks, with a lightness of heart he never imagined he'd feel again, it is a gift worth fighting for. 

The road to Balbadd is long before him, but he pays it no real mind. His journey was begun much longer ago than this. He will not stop now.


End file.
